Poetry by Priyanka Aravind P.: ‘I too had a mother, / Who fed me with knowledge so ancient, / And called me her brightest star, // until I misspelt a note from the sacred chants.’

Poetry by Sindhuri Rao: ‘Keep everything you bought here— / your eager dreams, / hanging garments, / obedient smiles, / unpressed rages, too. / “Be our guest.”’

Poetry by Suhana Bhattacharya: ‘i measure distance / not in miles / but in the way my mother says “beta” / over a lagging call / where her voice arrives before her breath’

Poetry by Siddh Dutta: ‘Her hours went into my becoming, / cruel it feels now / to realize how freedom can vanish without chains. / How may one choose a cage / and call it duty?’

Poetry by Kartikay Agarwal: ‘Will the last book of the last people to write books / (when all else is said) at the end just say ‘write to me’? // The wheel spins the pot to life, yet leaves no trace, / You be potter, mould life into my clay—write to me.’

Poetry by Bunny: ‘I dip the iris in soy / and watch the dark eat the color. / Still, through the stain, I see you.’

Poem by Anju Devadas R D: ‘Ink spills like blood, / blotting the margins of her name. / Each word a bone, / each sentence, / a noose of syntax.’

“Poetry is the diary I always carry with me.” Gopal Lahiri’s collection Selected Poems (2025) cultivates a privacy that invites readers to the poet’s second self in consciousness. By Dustin Pickering

Poetry by Neera Kashyap: ‘The light sputtered back; her frame froze. / A crow sliced over her head, cawing noisily, / flapping free of the remains of the day.’

Poetry by Carol D’Souza: ‘Before the tabla taal of inevitability / kicks in the apocalypse, the first few bars / of this blue ghazal are clear notes / of what could have been.’

Poetry by Parismita Kakati: ‘When they burn me by the river, my pyre ignites / with smoke that rises thick and not sandalwood sweet / A stench grapples the air, reeking of desire / like overripe fruit splitting under its own weight.’

Poems by Prahi Rajput: ‘the surviving curiosity / in descendant’s narrative is wrested from a ticket & one welcomes / the other through its foreign / door/translating displacement & dialect’